This wonderful talk is by Dr. Brené Brown, a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work. It’s entertaining (you won’t be bored!) and touches on some profound truths. Very worth watching!

From the moment you are born, being fed is strongly associated with comfort and love. For infants, food and hugs go together, and that emotional imprinting stays with you for life. Cooking for someone is a way to show love. A box of chocolates is a traditional gift of love on Valentine’s Day. So it’s no surprise that loneliness is one of the most common triggers for emotional eating. Food is an emotional surrogate for love.

Everybody feels passing loneliness now and then, but that’s not the kind of loneliness that people eat over. The kind of loneliness that you eat over is the aching kind that feels never-ending, and grows out of another problem that needs solving. Sometimes loneliness is situational – for example, moving to a new place. But if you’ve had plenty of time to develop social contacts and you’re still lonely, you’re "chronically lonely". That’s the hardest type of all, and the subject of this article.

Why do chronically lonely people often feel lonely even when they’re with other people? Why do they often resist spending time with others? Why do they often find it so unbearable to be home alone in the evening? And what is the solution?

The Problem of Not Liking Yourself

When you’re chronically lonely, just being around other people doesn’t fix it. You can be married and lonely; you can be lonely in a crowd. If you’re chronically lonely, what you lack is authentic connections with other human beings, and generally that’s because you block these connections by not sharing your authentic self. Why?

People who are chronically lonely almost always have as a core problem that they don’t like themselves very much. The give-away is that they generally find it almost unbearable to be alone – especially at night when the distractions of the day are over and it’s quiet. They may even dread turning off the light to go to sleep at night, and procrastinate on that.

Chronically lonely people often have an almost phobic reaction to being by themselves. It feels like falling down a black hole – an awful "dust in the wind" feeling of utter emptiness and alienation from everything and everyone, as though you’re the only person on the planet. If you live alone, you probably avoid going home at night because you can’t bear to be home alone with that feeling. You call it loneliness, but it’s really something else. It’s the horrors; it’s existential alienation. The Big Empty.

Quiet evenings alone are often when emotional eaters binge, perhaps numbing out in front of the TV. They may stay awake until so late that they practically drop from exhaustion, or they may use alcohol to go to sleep so they don’t have to experience their own thoughts lying in bed in the dark.

What is this about? If you can’t bear to be by yourself, it essentially means you can’t bear yourself – you can’t bear your own company, you can’t bear the experience of being "you". That is a huge problem, and it’s also a big block to developing healthy relationships. That’s why it goes along with loneliness and people call it loneliness, but it’s not exactly the same as loneliness.

You can’t stand your own company without distractions because you don’t like yourself. And because you don’t like yourself, you assume no one else will like you either, causing you to shun social contact, making you lonely.

Here’s the good part. I can tell you this for sure. That awful feeling you have about yourself? That horrible feeling that you are flawed and not the same as everyone else? It’s just a feeling. It’s not reality. You are fine! There is nothing wrong with you.

I have worked with many clients, both in the Normal Eating Support Forum and private one-on-one sessions. I’ve known many people who feel worthless, but not one of them ever was worthless – never. They were all beautiful people who were sadly mistaken in their assessment of themselves. The three reasons I see over and over again for serious self-esteem problems are:

• parental neglect or abuse (sometimes not recognized for what it is)
• childhood bullying (most commonly during middle school, ages 12-14)
• growing up gay (because of cultural prejudice)

What these situations (and others like them) have in common is that an innocent child is being told repeatedly that they are wrong or worthless at a time when they do not have the emotional resources to argue with the verdict. That damages self-esteem, but it does not make it true! As an adult you need to recognize this and argue with these old tapes.

You Need Authentic Human Connection

Just being in the proximity of other humans does not cure loneliness. Married people can be lonely. Going to bars and engaging in superficial chit-chat doesn’t cure loneliness. Picking up strangers for sex doesn’t cure loneliness.

The only thing that cures loneliness is authentic human connection. That means allowing another to see you for who you really are and experiencing their acceptance, and seeing another for who they really are and accepting them.

If you don’t like yourself much, it can be scary to let others see the real you. Your impulse will be to hide your real thoughts and feelings under the mistaken notion that the real you is unacceptable and will be rejected. But you’ve got to get past this and take the risk because if you never let anyone see you, you will stay lonely.

That’s not to say you should wear your heart on your sleeve and open up to everyone you meet. Part of good self-care is exercising good judgment and keeping yourself safe. Test the waters with people – make sure they can be trusted with your vulnerable inner self before you reveal too much. Share a little and see what they do with it before sharing more.

One very safe place you can start is the Normal Eating Support Forum. The forum is unique – truly the best support forum on the internet. There is no flaming of any kind, and not a lot of shallow chit-chat or off-topic posts, as in most forums. People talk from the heart about deep personal issues. You can be authentic here, and you can connect. Plus I moderate the forum so you’ll find some good recovery from emotional eating. It’s not just a lot of whining; people make progress. Unlike the blog, the forum is private. Only members have access, and the forum is blocked from all search engines; nothing you type will ever appear in an internet search.

12-step groups are another safe source of support. People are most familiar with AA and NA for alcohol and drug addiction, but there is also a 12-step group for dysfunctional interpersonal relationships such as CoDA, Al-Anon, and SLAA, to name just three. 12-step groups have rules against cross-talk (commenting on what someone else says) and personal attack.

Other types of organizations and groups may offer safe forms of authentic human contact as well. Explore what’s available in your area. The important point is this: Just signing up for activities will not do it. To break through loneliness you need to find places where you can have real heart-to-heart conversations with people who can hear you, understand you, and support you. They do exist!

Have you experienced the kind of chronic loneliness I describe here? Please share your experiences. I’d love to hear from you.

A lot of emotional eaters eat fast – not just a little bit fast, but extremely fast, minimally chewing their food, and raising the next bite to their mouth before the bite they’re chewing is swallowed. Everybody knows the reasons not to do this:

• You barely taste your food or experience having eaten it, and thus need more to feel satisfied.
• Your body doesn’t have time to give you physical cues of satiation, so you eat painfully past full.
• Insufficient chewing causes problems with digestion that are uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.

Slowing down is desirable, but the tricks people use to do this – eat with the opposite hand, count your chews, or (most bizarre) use an iPhone app that rings a bell when you’re allowed to take the next bite – are as “tail wagging the dog” and doomed to failure as dieting to control emotional eating.

If you want to stop emotional eating, you need to understand why you’re doing it and address the underlying issues. If you want to stop fast eating, you need to understand why you’re doing it and address those issues. So why do you do eat so fast?

Why Do You Eat So Fast?

There’s been a lot of discussion about fast eating in the Normal Eating Support Forum. Here are some of reasons members give for fast eating:

“I eat fast, sometimes it’s because my kids are screaming for attention so I shovel it in and carry on but mostly even when I have no distractions I eat fast. I find it hard enough to eat without reading something let alone savour every bite…”

“I was raised in a house where you ate now and tasted it later. Food was not savored (the oldest of us played football and wrestled and could eat an entire box of cereal for breakfast and have room leftover). For me, fast eating is about tucking away the treat that won’t be there because… because. Hmm. Why won’t it be there? I don’t live with my brother any more.”

“I always ate faster than my mom and would get so mad at her because she ate soooo slow and then had to finish her tea and smoke her cigarette before we could leave a restaurant. I rush my kids to hurry up too which is not a good habit to instill in them. I am type A and always in a hurry. I really want to be a calm, moderate sensible person but I am uncomfortable when everything is calm (as much as I want that!).”

“DH called while I was eating. He is on his way home. I suddenly had the urge to finish. Almost like I was in a panic that he would know how late I ate lunch. As if it matters to him.” (Notice the guilt in this quote – more on this in a bit.)

All these descriptions share the themes of anxiety and guilt. Something about eating slowly and mindfully makes these fast eaters feel anxious, guilty, or both. Feelings of anxiety and guilt interfere with the ability to mindfully enjoy the food.

Anxiety and Guilt About Eating

If you want to know what your particular guilt and anxiety in eating is about, the best way to discover this is to eat very slowly for as long as you can bear to do it, and monitor your feelings. What are you thinking about? For example:

• If you’re worried about getting stuff done, then you have a self-care issue. You don’t take time for yourself.
• If you’re worried about someone “catching you” eating – even if this is irrational – then you have guilt about eating.

It’s very common for people to feel guilt about savoring their food – especially if they’re overweight. Often people who are overweight don’t feel they have the right to eat at all, let alone enjoy what they eat.

The guilt is compounded by our culture’s puritanical attitudes towards any sensual enjoyment – the idea that truly high-minded people eat only to fuel their bodies and don’t really enjoy it. The sensual enjoyment of food is considered vaguely obscene. This attitude is not dissimilar to our culture’s attitude towards sex.

So one thing that may help in slowing down is to remind yourself of these two points:

• You have the right to take time for self-care and enjoyment – you don’t have to be productive every waking minute, nor should you be.
• You have the right to savor and enjoy delicious food in all its sensual glory, no matter what your current weight.

But counteracting these negatives just clears the blocks to eating slowly – it doesn’t get you to actually do it. What gets you to actually do it is to focus on the positives, the payoffs.

Slow Eating is a Means, Not an End

I’m a slow eater, and have been for as long as I can remember. But I don’t do it because I read somewhere that I should. I do it because that’s how I enjoy eating. If I eat fast, I get a stomach ache because I can’t chew the food well enough and it sits in my stomach like a lump. Plus I can’t tell when I’m satiated so I overshoot and eat past full, and I hate that feeling. Worst of all, I miss the enjoyment – I don’t get to savor the food as it goes down. Basically, fast eating makes for a much less pleasant eating experience. I want to enjoy my food, not inhale it and end up with a stomach ache.

Though I make no effort to eat slowly, I’m always the last one to finish when I eat with others. In fact, I try to speed up when I’m with others who have finished eating and the entire table is staring impatiently at me. There’s no effort in slow eating for me because it’s the direction of pleasure. I don’t experience any anxiety or guilt when I eat slowly and mindfully, and I’m very attuned to the benefits of slow eating.

In other words, the reason to eat slowly isn’t to eat slowly. It’s not an end in itself that you can achieve through artificial, mechanical tricks. The reason to eat slowly is as a means for savoring your food, making sure your gut feels good as the food goes down, and being in tune with your body’s satiation signals so you don’t inflict pain on your body by overeating. These benefits require mindfulness – paying attention to the taste of your food, the feeling of the food in your gut, and your body’s satiation signals.

If you are busy counting your bites, struggling with a fork in your opposite hand, or listening for an iPhone ding to tell you when to take the next bite, you can’t enjoy your food. How can you pay attention to your eating experience at all with these mechanical distractions to slow yourself down? It’s like trying to eat normally through the artifice of a weight loss diet. It might work temporarily, but eventually it’s just too annoying to sustain.

If you want to sustain a new behavior over the long term, it has to be intrinsically pleasurable. That’s why diets don’t work. And that’s why you need to find the joy in slow eating.

Slow Eating, the Natural Way: Try This!

These mechanical tricks to eat slowly don’t work over the long term any better than a diet, but here’s a suggestion that two forum members found that does work. Pretend you are a restaurant critic and will be called upon to review the food you are eating. Ask yourself, “How does this taste?” Just that will help, but then you may want to go even further. From a forum member:

As noted, asking yourself “how does this taste?” helps. It has helped me slow down somewhat to eat with the intention of reporting on the flavors, textures, and experiences as specifically as possible afterward. Sometimes I try to approach it a little like a food critic (e.g., “Cherries were crisp, but not as tart as expected; maybe going out of season. Flavor was a good counterpoint to crackers, which were flour-y and nicely bland.”).

First clear the way for enjoyment by working on any anxiety and guilt that comes up when you slow down. Once you’ve done this, focusing on the “How does it taste?” question is a good way to put you in touch with the pleasure side of the equation.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

Great lecture by Gary Taubes on the true causes of obesity that explodes many common myths – including the widely held belief that obesity is a simple matter of calories in exceeding calories out. You think this is obviously true? It’s not. Watch!

People are overweight either because they eat too much food or they eat the wrong food (too many processed foods, too many sweets). But it is not for lack of knowledge of what to eat, and this is a crucial point. Most overweight people could write a book about nutrition and what they "should" be eating. They know what to do, but they don’t do it. Why?

It’s not that fat people are weak or morally deficient. It’s that there is a compulsive aspect to overeating. Part of it is the physical effect of processed food – sugar, salt, and fat. But this isn’t the whole story, and it’s not even the biggest part of the story because people can and do learn to eat moderate amounts of these types of foods.

The main reason for overeating is emotional eating – stress eating. And here’s the thing: dieting can’t fix that.

Why Diets Don’t Work

The chief characteristic of emotional eating is that it has an involuntary, compulsive quality – it feels like something you are not choosing to do, like something you can’t help but do. If you are overweight due to emotional eating, that is the problem that needs to be solved: the out-of-control eating.

A diet does not solve this problem except in a very temporary way, and then it boomerangs, making the problem worse. A diet adds a tiny bit of resistance to an extremely strong compulsion, but over time strengthens the compulsion by giving a feeling of deprivation. So the longer you are on the diet, the stronger the feeling of deprivation, until eventually you break the diet and eat more than ever.

If you are overweight because of emotional eating, the solution has to be an elimination of the emotional eating, the compulsion itself. Diets strengthen the compulsion, not eliminate it, so they are not the solution. Study after study shows that diets don’t work. More than 95% of dieters regain any weight they have lost plus some.

What does work is to resolve the emotional eating issues, and restore normal eating by reconnecting with natural hunger and satiation cues.

Myths and Facts About Normal Eating

There are some common misunderstandings of what attuned eating means, and also some differences between Normal Eating and other attuned eating programs. Here are some myths and facts:

How to Stop Emotional Eating

Much of the work I do with people in the Normal Eating Support Forum and in private coaching revolves around emotional eating – that maddening, self-sabataging, compulsive behavior that can make people feel crazy and desperate.

The important thing to remember about emotional eating is that this is not something you can fix by buckling down and getting serious about self-control because it’s not a problem of self-control.

You can’t fix a problem unless you understand the true nature of the problem. Emotional eating arises from unresolved stress and unmet needs. And while it doesn’t fix the underlying problem, emotional eating does temporarily ease the discomfort, providing a food band-aid. You can’t expect to permanently remove the food band-aid without addressing the underlying problem in some way. No one can just endure pain.

This is not to say that people know why they are eating. Usually they don’t.

At its core, food is a distraction – perhaps the world’s greatest distraction. First there’s the pleasurable physical sensation, so it’s grabbing you on that most basic level. And then there is the obsessive self-castigation and weight loss attempts afterwards. It’s incredibly effective for pushing other thoughts out of your mind.

Essentially what you do with emotional eating is exchange a very disturbing thought or feeling for the still-disturbing-but-less-so problem of emotional eating.

The process you go through with the Normal Eating method is to undo this distraction, trick your mind into telling you what it’s hiding from you, what is really wrong. Once you know, then you can address the real issues and you no longer need to eat over them. The bonus is that your life improves, too.

Permanently Solve Your Weight Problem

People are frustrated with their weight, and ads for diet programs shout at you from all directions. The ones that sell best promise a fast solution to excess weight with little or no effort: “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days while eating all you want!”

The problem is, these solutions are temporary more than 95% of the time – studies prove it. So you’ll buy their solution, it will work for a while, and then it will stop working. A year from now you’ll be in the same situation and you’ll be in the market for another diet program.

Normal Eating offers a permanent solution, but it’s a harder sell. Here’s what I promise: You can be a normal weight person who comes by it naturally, without worrying about what you eat. It takes 1-2 years and it’s very hard work. You must dive into your soul and and really face who you are. You must confront the core reasons behind your emotional eating, and possibly make some difficult life changes. But if you do that, you will truly be free of the eating and weight problem for the rest of your life. You will become your normal weight without dieting, and you will stop obsessing on eating and weight.

That may sound hard, but if the easier, softer way doesn’t work, perhaps walking through the fire and solving the problem for good and for real actually is the easier, softer way.

If you have questions or comments about Normal Eating, please post them! I would love to hear from you.

It’s holiday time. Those of us in the U.S. had our Thanksgiving feast just a few days ago. Jews around the world are about the celebrate the first night of Channukah, and then right after that is Christmas. No rest for the weary tummy!

There is no better time to return to Normal Eating. That certainly beats stressing out about the holidays and eating yourself sick as you fight with yourself over every mouthful.

The Normal Eating Forum is the companion support group to my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight. I’ve noticed quite a few old familiar names reappearing in the Normal Eating Forum recently, and it’s so nice to see them again. How about you? Are you struggling with food? Come back to Normal Eating! If you purchased a lifetime membership, you can come back at any time. If you don’t remember your password, you can use the “forgot password” link to retrieve it – assuming you still have the same email address. If you don’t, just email me and I’ll get you set up again. If you’re not yet a member, join us!

Phone Coaching for Personalized Support

The combination of the book and the support forum may be enough to get you on track. But sometimes people get stuck and need more individualized help. That’s where private coaching comes in. I provide coaching by phone at an affordable price to people all over the world. If you’re outside the U.S., we’ll talk via Skype. I’ve got clients in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Sometimes the time zones can be a little tricky, but usually we can work it out.

Someone recently asked in the forum what to expect, and here’s what I posted in reply. I removed two names to protect anonymity:

Coaching is highly individual – it’s not one-size-fits all like a book. There are certain tools from the program that I use with most everyone because I’ve found them to be so useful – for example, the weight history and the eating experience log. But the content of what we talk about varies as widely as people vary. And sometimes I give individual assignments. [Person-1] talked about how I gave her individualized things to write about and read – I don’t do that with everyone. Everybody’s issues differ, everybody’s needs differ.

Sometimes (not always) I work with some people on the quality of their diet, if it’s really a problem. Some people, as I posted in [Person-2]’s blog, need some amount of structure to their eating for various reasons, at least for a time. We always talk about life more than food, but the eating patterns point to the parts of life that need focus. In the end, both life and eating improve.

The coaching page contains current pricing, and a testimonial from a former client.

If you have questions about Normal Eating, or how to enjoy your holidays without obsessing, stressing, or overeating, please post them! I would love to hear from you.

Recently a new member in the Normal Eating Support Forum posted this message (edited for brevity):

Right now I eat a junkfood diet and have for decades. I don’t eat fruit or vegetables hardly ever. I never learned to prepare dinner every night. I live mostly on pizza, hamburgers and fries, Chick-Fil-A and restaurant food. I also have a sugar jones. I fall asleep, wake up an hour or two later and then when half awake go down and binge on cookies, candy, cake, and other sweets.

I understand stage one is about legalizing all food. I know I have to stop thinking of these foods as “bad” and beating myself for eating them. How can I lose my shame over eating these foods?

She is right that there is no shame in food choices – ever – and that you have the right to eat whatever you want. But she is wrong that the foods she’s eating are not “bad”. They’re pretty bad nutritionally, though she still has ever right to eat them. It’s also not true that the first stage of Normal Eating is “legalizing”. She’s confusing Normal Eating with some other attuned eating programs that I think make a serious mistake.

You Have the Right to Eat Unhealthy Foods

Most attuned eating programs share the concept of “legalizing”, teaching that no foods are good or bad, and chocolate and lettuce are equally valid choices at meal time. The process of legalizing generally involves eating a lot of the “formerly forbidden” food. My observation is that this leads to weight gain – sometimes significant weight gain – that is never lost.

Normal Eating emphatically does not use the term “legalizing” because I think this way of looking at the problem misses the point. The key point is this: You have the right to eat foods that are bad for you. It’s not that you have the right to eat a food because it’s not “bad”. It’s that you have the right to eat it even though it’s “bad”!

The reason this point is crucial is that recovery requires you to recognize both your rights and your responsibilities. If you don’t understand the nutritional value of different foods, you can’t ultimately take responsibility for your food choices – the final goal in Normal Eating.

The main purpose of Normal Eating’s Stage 1, “Reframing”, is to recognize your right to eat whatever you want, healthy or unhealthy, and to reframe it as a self-care issue rather than a moral issue. This is the answer I gave to the woman I quoted above:

Stage 1 isn’t about particular foods not being good or bad, because in fact some foods are better for your health than others – not trying to get you to turn off your common sense here. It’s about recognizing your right to eat whatever you please, good or bad, healthy or not healthy. It’s your body, your life, your choice. You are the only one who can say what is right or wrong for you, or weigh the trade-offs for you. Extreme austerity in food choices for maximum health isn’t what makes everyone happy. Choose what makes you happy, but do it with open eyes, full awareness of trade-offs, and no regrets.

A slice of cake isn’t good for you, but it’s enjoyable, and one piece of cake after a meal of real food won’t significantly harm health. If you have it on a regular basis you may weigh a few pounds more, but that may be worth it to you. When looked at this way it’s an open-eyed choice, in full recognition and acceptance of the downside.

This is very different from saying that cake is as valid a selection for dinner as vegetables, and one is not good and one bad. When you deny cake’s nutritional downside, then you are surprised by its consequences and your choice is not really a choice.

Extreme Junk-Food Diets

Every once in a while, I encounter someone trying to practice attuned eating – waiting for hunger, eating to satiation – while eating a diet that is 100% junk food: For example, soda and a sweet roll for breakfast, snacking on candy throughout the day, noodles and more soda for lunch, pizza or some other fast food for dinner, and no fresh fruits or vegetables at all. (The white flour in noodles, pizza, and most breads – even many breads marked “whole wheat” – is a refined carbohydrate and metabolically indistinguishable from sugar.)

You can’t eat normally if this is what you’re eating. Refined carbohydrates short-circuit the body’s hunger and satiation cues, and also wreak havoc on your blood sugar, further confusing hunger and satiation cues. This would be true if you were subsisting on a natural sugar like honey. When it’s a processed food, like what you get at McDonald’s or in the frozen food section, it’s even worse.

Processed foods are formulated in labs by scientists whose job it is to circumvent your satiation cues so you’ll eat more and buy more. These companies want to make money, and the more you eat the more money they make. Food companies spent millions of dollars on research into how to turn your body wisdom against you, and they are very good at it.

Because of this, when your entire diet consists of processed food – particularly high-carb processed food (candy, soda, noodles, bread, cookies, cake) you cannot rely on internal hunger and satiation cues. Almost anyone eating these foods is going to overeat simply because of what they are eating. Also, eating this way long-term puts you at risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Attuned eating works best when you’re eating real food – fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit, the stuff that spoils in a few days if you don’t eat it. That’s when your body gives you the most accurate hunger and satiation signals. This also happens to be the food that provides the body with the nutrition it needs – not a coincidence.

So how do you get yourself to eat real food after years of eating the fake stuff chemically formulated to take over your mind?

Reawakening Body Wisdom

As soon as you’re able to observe your eating without judgment (the goal of Stage 1), you should move onto Stage 2, “Reconnecting”.

Stage 2 is about reconnecting with yourself both physically and emotionally. On the physical level, the main task of Stage 2 is reconnecting with body wisdom – the part of you that intuitively has a taste for salad when your body needs fiber, or feels like eating carrots when your body needs Vitamin A.

Eating foods that meet your body’s nutritional needs makes you feel really good, physically and emotionally. Your whole body sings. It’s a feeling of profound well-being. Once you experience this, in a conscious way and without the emotional overlay of “I’m on a diet”, you’re going to want that feeling again. This experience is the foundation that eventually allows you to be one of those people who sometimes prefers a salad to a cookie. The way you get there is through food experiments.

In the chapter on Stage 2 in Normal Eating for Normal Weight, there’s a section called “Be a Scientist, Do Experiments”. The first experiment is meant to help people start to move off junk-food diets:

If you always eat similar foods, you may not be able to tell how a food makes your body feel because you have nothing to compare it with. Try pasta for dinner one night, then chicken with veggies the next night, and then cake for dinner the next. All three will satisfy hunger, but they have very different effects on your body. Notice how much better you feel when you eat foods that nourish. If you don’t try it, you can’t know.

The food experiments in Stage 2 are crucial. Don’t skip over this part – I’ve noticed that many people do. Not all the experiments are about eating your vegetables. Read the book for some other things to try out.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

This is Katie Makkai at the National Poetry Slam in 2002, talking about the dream of being pretty. You don’t want to miss this. It is awesome.

I found out recently that the counseling degree I received in 1980 became licensable in New York State in 2005. Had I learned this when it first happened, I could have been grandfathered in and my services would have been eligible for insurance reimbursement. But unfortunately, I found out only a few weeks ago – long after the grandfathering deadline of January 1, 2006. I could still go through the licensing procedure, but it would take years and may not be realistic without the grandfathering – all of which caused me to reassess my fees.

I originally based my fees on what’s usually charged for life coaching, which can be quite expensive (double what I’d been charging) and is never covered by insurance. But in practice I’ve found that my fees put coaching in reach only for affluent clients, and I don’t want to only help affluent clients. So last week I decided to significantly lower my coaching rates.

I posted about this in the Normal Eating forum, and it led to an interesting discussion about phone coaching – who needs it, when do you need it, how does it work? Questions and answers follow.

Who should consider coaching?

Well, first I’ll say that everyone working on Normal Eating should have some type of support. This is very important. There is so much social pressure to diet and be obsessive about your body that it’s very difficult to do this without some sort of antidote to that.

For some, the Normal Eating forum is enough. The forum is wonderfully supportive, and is also very affordable – just a one-time fee.

Coaching is qualitatively different – it’s similar to the difference between joining a gym and hiring a personal trainer. Coaching focuses you much more intensely on your eating issues so you can identify what’s holding you back and get past it quicker.

I got the impression in the forum discussion that some people felt they shouldn’t need this – that only people who are too weak to do it on their own need coaching. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Hiring a coach is very similar to hiring a personal trainer at the gym – it just gets you where you’re going faster. Anyone working on Normal Eating will benefit from coaching. It’s just a question of whether you want to do this for yourself.

Is coaching covered by insurance?

Unfortunately, no, coaching isn’t covered by insurance. Licensing is required for insurance coverage. As of 2005, my degree in counseling qualifies me to be licensed in New York State as a Mental Health Counselor, but I did not find this out quickly enough to be grandfathered in (I received my degree in 1980). Without grandfathering, the licensing process is very time consuming and difficult. So instead I’ve lowered my rates by almost 50%, which amounts to much the same thing since most insurance policies cover 50% of mental health services.

Can you talk to clients in Europe with Skype?

I have a Skype account, so the only obstacle in talking to clients in other countries is time zones. Generally there is no problem with the United Kingdom. Late afternoon or evening there (when people get off work) is morning or afternoon where I am. That works well.

How do I start phone coaching?

Send me email, and we’ll figure out a time for our first appointment. I’ll ask you to prepare for our first appointment by sending me your weight history, written in the Normal Eating style, and to send this to me at least an hour before we talk. This special way of writing the weight history is described in my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight, and is designed to get at hidden patterns and triggers. We’ll spend the first session talking about your history and your goals for coaching. What happens next depends on your individual needs and issues.

So what does coaching cost? For the most recent pricing, please visit the Personal Coaching page on the Web site.

If you have comments or questions about coaching, please post them. I’d love to hear from you!

For an emotional eater, giving up dieting can be terrifying. Suddenly there are no rules. You’re responsible for your own food choices, and you’re not sure you can be trusted. You may have struggled for years with lack of control around food. You may fear that Normal Eating can’t work for you, that you don’t have the ability to choose well. You may feel that the only possible way to control what you eat is through the external strictures of a diet.

The culture at large reinforces this fear. If you tell someone you’ve decided not to diet anymore, you’re likely to be told what a dangerous mistake you’re making, how natural appetites have no natural limits, and the only way to lose excess weight is through a diet. You’ve probably been told every day of your life that you’re not competent to choose your own food.

But it’s not true! Natural limits are part of our natural instincts. You just lose touch with your natural, internal controls when you become used to looking outside yourself for guidance. As you reconnect with yourself and learn to meet your needs in authentic ways, compulsion melts away and you are able to eat normally.

Normal Eating: Control From Within

Eating normally means eating as much as you want whenever you want, but it doesn’t mean eating without any limits or control. When you’re on a diet, control comes from external rules that are unrelated to hunger, satiation, or how different foods make your body feel. When you’re eating normally, controls come from within, from what your body is telling you it needs.

We are born knowing how to eat normally. An infant knows when she’s hungry, and knows when she’s had enough. If you try to put food into the mouth of an infant who is no longer hungry, she purses her lips and moves her head from side to side to avoid the spoon.

This body wisdom about what and how much you need to eat is still inside you – you just need to reconnect with it. You don’t need a diet to tell you what to eat. Animals in the wild manage to get exactly the nutrition they need. Have you ever seen a fat deer in the woods? We are born with this same body wisdom.

People with a history of compulsive eating are often so disconnected from their natural internal controls that they don’t even know when they’re hungry. A primary goal of Normal Eating is to put you back in touch with your own inner wisdom, and show you that you can trust it. (The other main goal of Normal Eating is to redirect the emotional needs behind cravings – check out the archives for more on that.)

Learning to Trust Yourself

Learning to trust yourself is key in Normal Eating, and I’m not just talking about eating choices. We are integrated beings. Either we trust ourselves, or we don’t. If you distrust yourself in one area, you will tend to distrust yourself in all areas – food, relationships, money, or whatever.

Happily, the spillover effect goes both ways. As you develop self-trust around food, you will trust yourself more in other areas. With self-trust comes self-respect, since you can’t trust yourself if you don’t respect yourself. And self-respect is the foundation of self-love. Just as you can’t love a partner you don’t respect, you can’t love yourself without respecting yourself. When you love yourself, you’ll take care of yourself. And when your needs are met, you won’t need to self-soothe with food. It all starts with trusting yourself!

Some newcomers to Normal Eating have likened the decision to stop dieting to jumping off a cliff with no parachute. But as they work through the Normal Eating stages they discover, to their surprise, that they can fly.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!